Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

Fatal Fridays: going to hospital is like tossing a coin

These days when you get ill you might as well call "heads" or "tails". Because survival depends on luck. As a huge new study has found, you would be well advised to get ill on a weekday. How you manage that, however, is not clear.

Britons who need an operation on a Friday are up to 44 per cent more likely to die following a procedure, we now know. That is an astonishing figure. Venture into a hospital on a weekend and you will find fewer staff on duty, temporary nurses and cleaners, and a proportional increase in the risk to patients during the critical 48 hours after surgery.

This alarming discovery drives home the point that the NHS is no longer an all-inclusive, fairly distributed service. It is a two-tier service, where a lucky and slim majority survive and thrive but an important minority don't.

Which group you belong to depends on whether you live in the right postcode, and when you get ill.

The provision, delivery and quality of healthcare services vary widely: if you're lucky, the local hospital has the money and highly motivated staff to ensure your waiting time is minimal, your diagnostic testing is thorough, and the life-saving drugs you need are there. In addition, in some hospitals, all of the above depends on their weekend coverage. As the British Medical Journal study has found, the quality of service slips dramatically by Friday evening. And no one seems to notice or care.

This has to change. The system as it stands is almost medieval in its ineptitude. And how incredible that this quirk has taken so long to emerge: presumably Fridays have been dangerous for decades.

This is what happens when you worship a system of healthcare rather than scrutinising it as dispassionately as you would any other public service.